How big a climate betrayal is the Willow Oil project?

US President Joe Biden's approval of ConocoPhillips' $8 billion plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from federal lands in Alaska "came with a thud of betrayal and an air of inevitability," says David Wallace-Wells. Wallace-Wells writes in her New York Times newsletter: "On the campaign trail, Biden promised 'no more drilling on federal lands, period.' Dot, dot, dot”. But for all the talk of the renewable energy boom and the green transition and all the money pouring into it, there has been little concerted effort, at least in the US, to actually reduce our wasteful use of what is actually poisoning the climate: fossil fuels.” He asks “how big a carbon bomb” is the Willow project, noting: “The honest answer is that it's not zero, but it's not catastrophically big in itself. If the project goes ahead and produces oil as predicted, it is expected to produce an extra 9.2 million metric tonnes of CO2 each year – roughly the equivalent of two new coal-fired power plants added to our fleet or 2 million petrol cars added to the road . That's bad—any amount of additional carbon promises to push the world even further outside the temperature envelope that has so far bounded and helped cultivate the entire history of human civilization... And yet 9 million metric tons represents only about two-tenths of 1 % of current US emissions.” But , he continues, "the same logic could be used to justify any particular fossil fuel project." Such is "the nature of the problem, which permeates almost every aspect of industrial and post-industrial civilization: The scale of the challenge seems to both urge urgency and recommend a kind of indifference." He concludes: "A line has to be drawn somewhere, and the Biden administration keeps crossing it."

David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times, Carbon Brief